by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, the Mars
movie screening in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of
two low-budget films, Devil Girl from Mars (a British production from 1954 about an implacable woman who arrives
on a spaceship from Mars that looks like a giant bathtub stopper looking for
men because the Martian males have become so emasculated through years of
battle-of-the-sexes civil wars with the Martian females they can no longer impregnate
them and make little Martians) and The Wizard of Mars, a truly weird American production from 1964
(though imdb.com gives the date as 1965, it’s 1964 that’s listed on the credits
as the copyright date — actually it’s MCMLXIV, but you get the idea) that’s
advertised as “starring John Carradine,” though given their ultra-limited
production budget ($33,000 according to imdb.com, $40,000 according to the
proprietor of the screening) they could only afford him for one day. By chance
they signed Carradine just as his (third) wife, Doris Rich, was playing Mrs.
Santa Claus in an even worse movie than this one, Santa Claus Conquers the
Martians (whose only distinctions
are that Pia Zadora had a child role in it and it features the same stock clip
of U.S. Air Force bombers doing air-to-air refueling that was seen in Dr.
Strangelove — so that clip ended up in
one of the worst movies ever made and one of the best!). The Wizard of Mars was at least to some extent intended by its
creators, writers David L. Hewitt (who also directed) and Armando Busick, as a
conscious parallel to The Wizard of Oz, but about the only real similarities are they’re both about four
people, including a woman named Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt), exploring a strange
world, finding a “Golden Road” and encountering a super-powerful being who
appears to them as a giant disembodied head. The setting is New Year’s Day 1975
and the crew of the first manned spacecraft to explore Mars — Dorothy (who’s
depicted not as the surprisingly
resourceful and plucky junior heroine L. Frank Baum envisioned in The Wizard
of Oz but yet another dull
spaceship crew member, sort of like Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek, who’s there just for window dressing and so the
filmmakers can feel oh so ahead of their time in actually putting a woman on a spaceship as part of the crew!), ship’s
commander Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee) and the incredibly annoying
comic relief character Charlie (Jerry Rannow, who seems to be spending the
whole movie trying to channel Jerry Lewis’s whiny delivery of dialogue even
though he hasn’t a clue how to do physical comedy — may the real Jerry Lewis
rest in peace and not have to fear from horrible imitators like this anymore!)
— were originally supposed only to orbit the Red Planet.
Instead they find themselves pulled in by some sort of
force beyond their control and end up landing on it. They had already
jettisoned the main stage of their rocket in the process of orbiting Mars, but
we’re told in the Hewitt-Busick dialogue that if they can only find it again,
they can use it to blast off the Martian surface and get home. Instead they get
stuck in an endless series of caves (imdb.com lists the location as Lehman
Caves in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada) which are actually the most
appealing element of the film: though the vistas get dull after a while, by
1964 color film was cheap enough that even ultra-low-budget productions like
this could use it, and the spectacular sights of the walls in Lehman Caves are
considerably more entertaining than the dreary antics of the humans walking
around them. (They also probably blew a big chunk of the budget renting the
extensive array of lights and porting in all that equipment they would have
needed to film inside caves.) Eventually, after narrowly avoiding falling into
the lava from a seemingly active volcano (that was obviously stock footage), they finally make
their way out of the cave only to stumble on a few golden paving stones
suddenly revealed when a sandstorm blows off the sand that had previously
covered them as part of the Martian desert. Following the golden brick road,
Our Non-Heroes find themselves inside a sort of mausoleum featuring a number of
glass tubes, each of them containing a sort of papier-maché body that looks
like the sort of thing you used to see inside a fun house. (Remember fun
houses? I’m probably part of the last generation that got to experience them in
our childhoods.) In any event, the travelers encounter one of these creepy
statues that talks to them, first in double-talk and then, as the whatsit
figures out their language, in English that sounds like the voice of John
Carradine — indeed, the figure looks like Carradine in elaborate trick-or-treater makeup, and I suspect the
filmmakers created this preposterous contraption so they could have a
mechanical Carradine to use for longer than the one day they had the real one
under contract.
Ultimately the real Carradine appears as a disembodied head in
front of a black screen and launches into a preposterous explanation of his and
the other indigenous Martians’ current plight that makes it seem like Hewitt
and Busick were ripping off not only The Wizard of Oz but Forbidden Planet as well: it seems that the “Martians” are actually
a super-powerful race that wandered around the galaxy with no fixed abode in
any one solar system. They developed their technological knowledge so
extensively that they were able to break any connection with space and appear
anywhere they wanted to as pure mental energy — but that wasn’t enough for them:
they also decided to break any connection with time, with the result that the entire race congealed
into the disembodied head of John Carradine and became immortal, which they
find so boring they plead with the astronauts to head into a ridiculous-looking
gizmo that appears as a Mr. Sun-type solar face with a pendulum attached. Once
they follow Carradine’s instructions and restart this device’s pendulum, time
will start again and all the entities appearing as Carradine’s head will be
able to die at long last — and once they do that, in a ripoff of the silly
ending MGM’s screenwriters put on the Wizard of Oz movie even though it wasn’t in L. Frank Baum’s
book, the astronauts come to aboard their spacecraft, still orbiting Mars, and
only two minutes have elapsed since their experiences started — that’s right,
folks, It Was All a Dream! If Devil
Girl from Mars was an example of the
frustrating sort of bad movie that isn’t good enough to be entertaining on its
own merits and isn’t bad enough to be camp, The Wizard of Mars (which also exists, according to imdb.com, in a
seven-minutes-longer version under the title Horrors of the Red Planet) is an example of that even more frustrating sort
of bad movie: one that seems to have a good movie trapped inside it, struggling
to get out.
The most interesting name on the credits of The Wizard of Mars is the film editor, Tom Graeff, who seven years
earlier had made a surprisingly compelling film called Teenagers from Outer
Space. Despite its terrible
title (the idea of Warner Bros.’ marketing department after Graeff sold the
film to them because they needed a double-bill partner for Gigantis, the
Fire Monster, actually the first sequel
to Godzilla) and some tacky production
values, Teenagers was a surprisingly
well-written and well-acted film, one of the better knockoffs of The Day the
Earth Stood Still with some quite original
aspects in its own right, including a quirky sense of spirituality — and bits
and pieces of that same sensibility appear in The Wizard of Mars, suggesting that in addition to editing the film
Graeff may have had a hand in writing it as well. (Eventually Graeff went so
far overboard with his quirky spirituality that he became convinced he was the
second coming of Jesus Christ, started an independent church where he was
worshiped as such, and even filed a petition with the Los Angeles County courts
to have his name legally changed to “Jesus Christ II” — which was
unsuccessful.) The Wizard of Mars is hardly the worst movie John Carradine was ever in — The Unearthly and the unspeakably awful The Astro-Zombies (which looks like it was shot on Super 8 and
sounds like it was recorded on cassettes) are definitely below this one on the
quality scale — but it’s an indication of how horrible Carradine’s career trajectory
was, from achieving notice in his marvelous supporting role in John Ford’s
underrated The Prisoner of Shark Island, his repeated appearances as part of the “Ford Stock Company” in films
like The Grapes of Wrath and Stagecoach, his marvelous starring role in Edgar G. Ulmer’s
1944 Bluebeard (a film of real quality,
and recognized as such at the time it was released), before his career trailed
off into ever tackier appearances in crap like this, from which he collected
the money so he could keep his semi-professional Shakespeare company in L.A.
going. (One wonders what its productions were like.) At least Boris Karloff
managed to maintain his dignity and pride no matter how crappy the films he got
cast in were; Carradine, like Bela Lugosi, seemed to be subsumed in them and
one gets the impression he can’t wait to get off the set, sign for his money
and go back to his friends and play Shakespeare!
